# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S222
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

222 Church and Current Events.

The Effect of Our Civil War. So writes Dr. Schaff in his new homiletic journal, in the June number: "The Americans are undeniably a vain, arrogant, and boastful people. But beneath the cover of this national fault there hides, nonetheless, a very deep moral and religious earnestness. This comes out very plainly everywhere in the present civil war. The stereotyped boasts of the political newspapers represent only the surface, the foaming and shifting waves and billows of the agitated national life and its struggling passions. In the depths a process of thorough national humbling is going forward, which Providence, through the mighty sermons of repeated defeats on the battlefields, is bringing home to us." God grant that it be so. We must confess that we perceive little of this effect, even when we look into the religious periodicals.

Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Under this title — certainly not a little striking in a church periodical — the "Lutheran and Missionary" of June 11 of this year publishes, without a word of comment, the following address, which goes out to the evangelical denominations of Christians in the United States: "Dear Brethren. At a meeting of pastors and members of various evangelical denominations of the cities of Pittsburgh and Allegheny, in the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church, on the 8th and 11th of May, the following proposals were adopted: 1. That it is the opinion of this meeting that an amendment, reading as follows, should be inserted in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. The proposed amendment consists of the words enclosed in brackets in the sentence: "'We, the people of the United States, [recognizing the being and attributes of Almighty God, the divine authority of Holy Scripture, the law of God as the supreme rule, and Jesus, the Messiah, the Savior and Lord of all], in order to form a more perfect Union, etc.'" 2. That on the coming 4th of July a religious National Council be held in the city of Pittsburgh, to take the proposed amendment into consideration. 3. That every evangelical denomination be invited to send four delegates to the said Council. 4. That a Committee be appointed to issue an invitation to the various ecclesiastical bodies throughout the whole land. — We, the undersigned, were appointed as the Committee to carry out this last proposal. In accordance with this appointment, we therefore cordially invite the various ecclesiastical bodies in the land to send four delegates to the said convention, which is to be held in the First United Presbyterian Church at Pittsburgh, on the coming 4th of July, at 10 o'clock in the morning, in order to consider what course of action would be most desirable in the present case.

R. Gracey, S. T. Steward,
John Douglas, Wm. J. Reid.

Poor people! How long will your blind guides go on proposing to you ways of rescue from your great misfortune that are in vain nonetheless. What good did it do the French people, gone mad, that it set up and recognized again, by a vote of the people, the God it had deposed? — Let one read history, which could teach so much, so much. Repentance, repentance alone can help you. Therefore do not listen to the fools who counsel you otherwise, and who only strengthen your pride further and heap up the wrath of God. C.

II. Abroad.

Hanover. So writes a friend from Hanover, under date of April 25 of this year: "Unfortunately I can once again report from here only such things as try and consume the faith, nothing that flows oil into its lamp. The land to which the praise was given from abroad, of being and wishing ever more to become a mighty bulwark of the Lutheran Church, is, it seems, entirely on the way to making its peace with the present un—